For more, subscribe to FILM COMPANION SOUTH: http://bit.ly/2xoNult Copyright ©2020 Venky Ramachandran.
February 2, 2021
For more, subscribe to FILM COMPANION SOUTH: http://bit.ly/2xoNult Copyright ©2021 Film Companion.
January 11, 2021
(by Jayram Sataluri) It was Sunday, April 17th 2011. I was at JP Stevens High School in Edison, New Jersey waiting outside the school.I did not have the exact money to pay for the ticket. But a family friend who I hadn’t seen in a decade understood my predicament and paid for it. I paid […]
September 30, 2020
For more, subscribe to FILM COMPANION SOUTH: http://bit.ly/2xoNult Copyright ©2020 Film Companion.
September 29, 2020
For more, subscribe to FILM COMPANION SOUTH: http://bit.ly/2xoNult Copyright ©2020 Film Companion.
September 28, 2020
In which I answer a few questions on an older film… or a new one… or talk about actors and directors… or take on a few YouTube comments… For more, subscribe to FILM COMPANION SOUTH: http://bit.ly/2xoNult Copyright ©2020 Film Companion.
September 25, 2020
A journey through the great singer’s songs in Tamil cinema, by the two great composers who used him the most, and used him the best. How on earth do you write about SPB? How do you contain the vastness of his accomplishments, the vast pleasures he has brought us, in a couple of thousand words? […]
September 8, 2020
At a macro level, there’s literally nothing you can sense at a one-line level and say, “Wow, this is going to be huge.” But the beautiful “micro” touches make the movie. You don’t associate the word “benign” with Ram Gopal Varma. You associate it with someone like Sooraj Barjatya, whose Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! had […]
August 3, 2020
Over the years, our film music has become increasingly Western. But listening to the stunningly classical “Garaj Garaj”, you wonder: Is OTT poised to change the OST? Here’s the description for Bandish Bandits on the Amazon Prime Video site: “Radhe a singing prodigy from a classical background & Tamanna, a pop sensation on the rise […]
July 31, 2020
In which I answer a few questions on an older film… or a new one… or talk about actors and directors… or take on a few YouTube comments… For more, subscribe to FILM COMPANION SOUTH: http://bit.ly/2xoNult Copyright ©2020 Film Companion.
July 15, 2020
July 9, 2020
Like in our classical dance, the idea was to create a “movement” or a “step” that illustrated the lyric. This is the tradition Saroj Khan inherited, and she ran with it. It’s no accident that Saroj Khan’s best-known dance choreography came in the Sridevi-Madhuri Dixit era. Indian mainstream cinema was still “Indian”, and not “Westernised”. […]
June 16, 2020
Recalling some of the composer-singer’s music, from the sombre Guru Dutt films to Girl Friend, which had ‘Boom booma boom’. When it comes to films, we may admire the choices an actor makes, but there’s always a doubt: Is this great bit of dialogue delivery the actor’s own choice, or did the director prompt him […]
June 12, 2020
June 8, 2020
The maestro is a talent that comes along once in the bluest of moons. My point is simply that his genius doesn’t need the negation of everyone who came before him. June 2 came and went. And with the day, Ilaiyaraja’s birthday, a hundred tribute pieces came and went into the Internet’s memory. If someone […]
May 30, 2020
(by Raghav Ravichandran) For somebody like me whose understanding of Hindi and generally the foray into Bollywood music happened in the early 2000’s there is one music composer duo, Vishal-Shekhar who have played a significant role in ensuring I became a big admirer of Bollywood Music and started following almost each Hindi album especially from […]
May 2, 2020
(by Raghav Ravichandran) This period of lockdown is a great time for people to rekindle lost hobbies, get back to doing something they wanted to do or just use this time to slow down and just use this time to strengthen the bond with family or friends which was lost for some reason or the […]
April 9, 2020
A remix itself isn’t a sin. Sometimes, it’s about a vision, about how you see the original song. But this Tanishk Bagchi version is just pointless. A little after T-Series dropped ‘Masakali 2.0’, the world found itself considering a new adjective to describe AR Rahman: “angry”. The Sufi saint of Indian film music took to […]
April 2, 2020
This isn’t just a movie’s soundtrack album. It’s a ‘concept album’, like the whoppers that major rock bands used to make when music was more than just something you listened to while doing the dishes. Spoilers ahead… Just how many AR Rahmans are there? For starters, there’s the AR Rahman who’s been at the top […]
November 13, 2019
(by Ankit Sinha) Cinema, plot and time, and why I think “Pal pal har pal” from Lage raho Munnabhai is The definitive Hindi film song “Pal pal..” is not just a great example of how to place film songs well in a narrative, but it can serve as the very image of the concept of […]
February 24, 2021
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